“One night,
not too long ago, I found myself lying on a hospital bed, saturated with
morphine. I wasn’t sure what exactly was happening to me, but I knew it wasn’t
good. The doctor kept walking in and out of the room, nervously checking my
X-rays. He wouldn’t talk to me, and the nurse stuck to professional silence.
Something was happening. It was happening to me. Was that it? Was it the end?

I used to
believe the myth that upon one’s death, one was entitled to the short,
condensed film of an entire lifetime flashing before one’s eyes. So I waited
for the screening to begin on the cloudy surface of my morphined eyelids. But
no visual recollection appeared to give me my share of cinematic
existentialism. There were no images of my first girlfriend to bring a tear to
my eyes, nor the slow-motion re-enactment of a long-forgotten hug with my
father. I felt no nostalgia, no inner peace. There was only a sharp feeling of
anger, ripping its way through the layers of sedatives.

Anger for
the hours I spent at school, when I was a child. Anger for the morning
sleepiness on the trains to work, while my life melted in a blur alongside that
of all the other commuters. Anger for the summer days spent in the office, for
the late shifts at work, for the cocktail parties, for the enforced fun. Anger
for all I didn’t do, in the name of something that now was nowhere near to give
me my pay back. Anger towards myself, for my unforgivable obedience. Why had I
wasted so much of my life trying to believe in the ‘higher purpose’ of what I
was doing? Why had I blindly poured so much of my energies in my studies, in my
career, in my good behaviour, if everything was now coming to an end, with no
possibility of return?

(…)

In the days
that followed, the thought of my coming encounter with another such moment took
hold of me completely. I didn’t want it to be like that again. I didn’t want to
see myself aged, lying on a hospital bed, once again sedated, shivering for the
anger of having wasted so many years, so many more then those I have wasted so
far. If all the promises of the abstractions I have believed in have revealed
themselves as utterly vacuous – if not as complete scams – the urgency of those
thoughts were still vivid in front of me in their honest reality. Revolution
might never happen, Progress might be just a line traced in the sand, Success a
carrot at the end of a stick, but that anger, that desperate feeling of having
wasted the little, precious time I had, was real, and it urged me to take
action”.

“John
Cage's disdain for records was legendary. He repeatedly spoke of the ways in
which recorded music was antithetical to his work. In Records Ruin the
Landscape, David Grubbs argues that, following Cage, new genres in experimental
and avant-garde music in the 1960s were particularly ill-suited to be
represented in the form of a recording. These activities include indeterminate
music, long-duration minimalism, text scores, happenings, live electronic
music, free jazz, and free improvisation. How could these proudly evanescent
performance practices have been adequately represented on an LP?

In their
day, few of these works circulated in recorded form. By contrast, contemporary
listeners can encounter this music not only through a flood of LP and CD
releases of archival recordings, but also in even greater volume through
Internet file-sharing and online resources. Present-day listeners are coming to
know that era's experimental music through the recorded artifacts of composers
and musicians who largely disavowed recordings. In Records Ruin the Landscape,
Grubbs surveys a musical landscape marked by altered listening practices”.

“Before
MP3s, CDs, and cassette tapes, even before LPs or 45s, the world listened to
music on 78rpm records—those fragile, 10-inch shellac discs. While vinyl
records have enjoyed a renaissance in recent years, good 78s are exponentially
harder to come by and play. A recent eBay auction for the only known copy of a
particular record topped out at $37,100. Do Not Sell at Any Price explores the
rarified world of the 78rpm record—from the format’s heyday to its near
extinction—and how collectors and archivists are working frantically to
preserve the music before it’s lost forever.

Through
fascinating historical research and beguiling visits with the most prominent 78
preservers, Amanda Petrusich offers both a singular glimpse of the world of 78
collecting and the lost backwoods blues artists whose 78s from the 1920s and
1930s have yet to be found or heard by modern ears. We follow the author’s
descent into the oddball fraternity of collectors—including adventures with Joe
Bussard, Chris King, John Tefteller, Pete Whelan, and more—who create and
follow their own rules, vocabulary, and economics and explore the elemental
genres of blues, folk, jazz, and gospel that gave seed to the rock, pop,
country, and hip-hop we hear today. From Thomas Edison to Jack White, Do Not
Sell at Any Price is an untold, intriguing story of preservation, loss,
obsession, art, and the evolution of the recording formats that have changed
the ways we listen to (and create) music”.

“In Chasing
Sound, Susan Schmidt Horning traces the cultural and technological evolution of
recording studios in the United States from the first practical devices to the
modern multi-track studios of the analog era. Charting the technical
development of studio equipment, the professionalization of recording
engineers, and the growing collaboration between artists and technicians, she
shows how the earliest efforts to capture the sound of live performances
eventually resulted in a trend toward studio creations that extended beyond
live shows, ultimately reversing the historic relationship between live and
recorded sound.

A former
performer herself, Schmidt Horning draws from a wealth of original oral
interviews with major labels and independent recording engineers, producers,
arrangers, and musicians, as well as memoirs, technical journals, popular
accounts, and sound recordings. Recording engineers and producers, she finds,
influenced technological and musical change as they sought to improve the sound
of records. By investigating the complex relationship between sound engineering
and popular music, she reveals the increasing reliance on technological
intervention in the creation as well as in the reception of music. The
recording studio, she argues, is at the center of musical culture in the twentieth
century”.